About

Here's a bit more about me, my professional background, and where I'm at now.

I work as a full-time Accessibility Engineer and I love it. I also enjoy learning more about accessibility and web development, creating projects, and writing about things I’ve learned online.

When I’m not working my day job or coding side projects, I like to keep my brain and body active.

Me dripping in sweat after completing my first 5k

My hobbies include reading, doing yoga, running, and learning guitar. I also enjoy adventuring to random parks and places with my partner. We’ve traveled to most cities along Florida’s east coast and have gone out of state to Nevada and Texas.

Casey and her partner Jeff on an island in Sebastian

My background

In 2016, I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Central Florida. Like many others, I realized I didn’t want to pursue a career related to my degree. (I majored in Exercise Science.)

After graduation, I took some time to figure out what direction I wanted to go in career-wise.

During this discovery period, I held a part-time job and launched a modest online business on WordPress.

It was a lifestyle apparel company that built up a decent following despite my not knowing anything about running a clothing business.

Anyway, I bought a WordPress theme that worked well for selling physical products online. It looked great but there were some styling tweaks I wanted to make.

Nothing major, mostly little things like color and spacing changes.

After submitting a few design requests to WordPress theme developers, I started to become familiar with HTML and CSS.

My support tickets looked a little like this:

“Hey, can we change this button to this color?” “Hi there, I noticed the spacing in this area looks a little squished. Can we add some space between this text and this image?”

Eventually, I started to pick up the lingo.

I figured out that “spacing” could either mean “padding” or “margin”. And “this color” was actually a pound sign followed by some crazy string of six digits; this madness is what developers call a hex color code.

Conversations like this are what sparked my interest in coding for a living.

I just kept finding myself asking “why” and then learning about it, and then asking “why” again.

It was curious fun.

One year after graduation

In early 2017, I committed to learning how to code for a living.

From what I researched, a career in tech was exactly what I wanted:

  • the opportunity to continue learning
  • creative problem-solving
  • a high earning potential
  • the possibility of working remotely
  • the opportunity to contribute to something bigger than myself

I studied day and night doing my best to learn the foundations of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on my own.

(By the way, it really was day and night. I had a part-time job with a varying schedule that allowed me to learn at the most random hours.)

I used freeCodeCamp.com as my main curriculum and YouTube to delve more into certain topics. Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the important role coffee played in all of this.

I spent months (less than six) learning and building projects before I landed my first developer job. It was a full-time in-office position where my primary responsibilities were coding emails and blog posts.

You can read more about how I learned to code and get a job on freeCodeCamp’s website ↗.

Since then, I’ve gone on to freelance and work full-time jobs at development agencies and small to medium-sized businesses as a Front End Developer.

Where I’m at now

Presently, I work full-time and 100% remotely as an Accessibility Engineer where I audit web pages and designs for WCAG 2.1 compliance.

I also code accessibility fixes, guide teams through accessibility, and write documentation on workflow and accessibility topics.

Additionally, my team and I work to optimize the process of how other teams work with accessibility. Our goal is to make working with our team as easy and streamlined as possible.

All-in-all, it’s a fun mix of work that I enjoy very much.

As I continue my journey in this field, I find myself remaining curious about web accessibility, user experiences, and the legal accessibility landscape.

Fun facts

Want to learn more? I have a LinkedIn page ↗ that I check regularly. You can message me there! If your message doesn’t seem like spam, I’ll likely reply.